New Zealand Ships Out Biomass That Could Replace Its Own Coal

Raw logs bound for China fetch $74 a tonne on a trade the audit puts at a loss, with 20 million of the 32 million tonnes New Zealand cuts each year still leaving through the Port of Tauranga.

Radiata pine stacked for export behind the fence line at the Port of Tauranga, the gateway for much of the 20 million tonnes New Zealand ships out each year, in the region a Bioeconomy Science Institute audit now names as able to supply 23 petajoules of domestic wood energy. (Photo Credit: © Beautifulblossom | Dreamstime.com)

The Bay of Plenty holds enough standing forest to take New Zealand off coal altogether, with the region able to supply 23 of the 60 petajoules a year that a new audit puts within reach of the country’s wood. That is according to Peter Hall, a forest scientist at the Bioeconomy Science Institute Maiangi Taio, who presented the audit to a Beca-sponsored energy symposium in Tauranga on Thursday and puts wood biomass at 46 petajoules of New Zealand’s 835 petajoules annual energy demand.

“Energy is a black hole for forestry,” Hall said of a domestic market he counts as able to take everything the country cuts and more. New Zealand harvests 32 million tonnes of timber a year, according to these figures, exporting 20 million tonnes of it, largely as raw logs, through the Port of Tauranga.

Logs leaving the country for China fetch NZ$74 a tonne on a trade Hall says runs at a loss, and he names uses for the same wood inside the Bay of Plenty that nobody is taking up.

Two bulk carriers moored alongside the log wharf at the Port of Tauranga, one of them deck-loaded with export logs, in a trade Peter Hall counts as running at a loss on the raw logs going to China. (Photo Credit: © Brian Scantlebury | Dreamstime.com)

Hall rests much of the case on firming, the ability to hold background generation steady as solar and wind fall away, because wood does not run seasonally or cyclically the way variable renewables do. He calls it a tri-vector fuel, able to deliver heat and steam, electricity, and liquid transport fuel from the same feedstock.

Peter Hall presents the Bay of Plenty wood energy audit in Tauranga on Thursday, beside a slide scoring wood as nationally applicable, not seasonal, not cyclical, and storable, with a forest set out on that slide as essentially a battery. (Photo Credit: Supplied)

Burning wood for heat converts at 82.5 per cent on Hall’s figures, a shade under coal’s 85 per cent, and his projections take in forest residue, thinnings, and shelterbelt trimmings alongside standing stock. Up to half of a felled tree can end up as forest or sawmill residue suitable for biofuel, ranging from coarse hog fuel to torrefied pellets with very low moisture.

Industrial users on the region’s doorstep have already made the switch, with Affco commissioning a highly automated wood pellet plant at Horotiu north of Hamilton and Fonterra running wood-fired boilers at Hautapu and Te Awamutu. All three sites are in Waikato rather than the Bay of Plenty, Wood Central understands, which leaves Hall’s 23 petajoules still looking for buyers.

“There is plenty of supply,” Aden Jones, regional manager at the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority, said of the 140 wood energy projects now running nationwide, naming the gap as communicating how to get fuel to the site that needs it.

Hall puts the supply beyond doubt for years ahead on current and past plantings, with the country’s planted production estate covering 1.818 million hectares at 1 April 2025 on the Ministry for Primary Industries count, a level he says was last reached in the late 1990s. Young stands already in the ground will absorb the carbon released by everything cut today, he told the symposium.

Paul Bennett, the institute’s integrated bioenergy portfolio lead, had already counted the national resource in May, putting three million hectares of unproductive land, one million of it in scrub, within reach of short-rotation supply on top of the residues already accessible.

It comes as wood processors gained a Crown-backed route to natural gas in May, when the Government agreed to guarantee 80 per cent of each supported loan under a $1.2 billion scheme that the Wood Processors and Manufacturers Association wants extended to biomass supply. NZ Bio Forestry and Ngāti Manawa have since signed a heads-of-agreement for an integrated wood-processing hub at Kaingaroa in the same region.

Jones counts 140 wood-energy projects on the ground already and sees the remaining task as moving fuel from the forest to the boiler rather than finding more of it. The Port of Tauranga ships most of the 20 million tonnes that leave New Zealand each year, from inside the one region Hall’s audit names as able to run the country off coal.

Source: https://woodcentral.com.au/bay-of-plenty-wood-energy/